Saul Bellow Biography

An American author of fiction, essays, and drama, Saul Bellow became
famous in 1953 with his novel
The Adventures of Augie March.
He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.

Early life

Saul Bellow was born of Russian immigrant parents in Lachine, Quebec,
Canada, on July 10, 1915. He learned to speak Hebrew, Yiddish, and
French as well as English. When he was nine his family moved to Chicago,
Illinois, and to this city Bellow remained deeply devoted. He was raised
in a strict Jewish household, and his mother, who died when he was
fifteen, wanted him to become a rabbi (a Jewish master or teacher).
After her death he drifted away from religious study and began to read a
wide variety of books. He quickly decided he wanted to be a writer.

After two years at the University of Chicago, Bellow transferred to
Northwestern University and obtained a bachelor's degree in
anthropology (the study of the origins and behavior of human beings) in
1937. He had wanted to study English literature but was warned that many
universities would not hire Jewish professors to teach the subject. Four
months after enrolling as a graduate student at the University of
Wisconsin, he quit school forever.

During the next decade Bellow held a variety of writing jobs—with
the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Writers' Project, the
editorial department of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
the Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College, and the Merchant Marine. His
first story was published in 1941, and he published two novels.
Dangling Man
(1944), in the form of a journal, concerns a young Chicagoan waiting to
be drafted into military service.
The Victim
(1947), a more ambitious work, describes a New Yorker struggling with
domestic and religious conflicts. Both novels received mixed reviews.

Writing career

After World War II (1939–45) Bellow joined the University of
Minnesota English Department, spent a year in Paris, France, and Rome,
Italy, and taught briefly at New York University, Princeton University,
and Bard College. Above all, however, he concentrated on writing
fiction. With the publication of
The Adventures of Augie March
(1953), Bellow won his first National Book Award. Bellow followed it in
1956 with
Seize the Day,
a collection of three short stories, a one-act play, and a novella (a
short novel or long short story). The novella, the title of which is
also the title of the volume, is about one day in the life of a
middle-aged New Yorker facing a major domestic crisis. Some critics feel
that this collection was Bellow's finest work.

In
Henderson the Rain King
(1959) Bellow described an American millionaire's flight from a
tangled marriage and his adventures in Africa. His next novel,
Herzog
(1964), won him a second National Book Award and international fame. It
portrays Moses Herzog, a middle-aged university professor, and his
battles with his faithless wife, his friend, and himself. Through a
series of unmailed letters, many of them highly comic, Herzog finally
resolves his struggles by achieving self-control.

In 1962 Bellow became a professor at the University of Chicago, a post
that allowed him to continue writing fiction and plays.
The Last Analysis
had a brief run on Broadway in 1964. Six short stories, collected in
Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories
(1968), and his sixth novel,
Mr. Sammler's Planet
(1969), elevated Bellow's reputation.
Humboldt's Gift
(1975) added the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature to
Bellow's list of awards.

Later years

Bellow's later novels did not receive the same praise.
The Dean's December
(1982) and
More Die of Heartbreak
(1987) retained his style, but some disliked the bitter tone that had
never shown up in previous Bellow works. After 1987 Bellow released a
number of novellas that met with similarly mixed reviews. Despite the
coolness toward his later work, Bellow's best fiction has been
compared to the Russian masters, Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) and

Saul Bellow.
Courtesy of the

Library of Congress

.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881). Robert Penn Warren's
review of
Augie March
in
The New Republic
in 1953 sums up reaction to his work: "It is, in a way, a
tribute … to point out the faults of Saul Bellow's novel,
for the faults merely make the virtues more impressive."

In 1995 Bellow nearly died after eating poisonous fish in the Caribbean.
After a long, slow recovery, he wrote
Ravelstein,
a novel, which was released in 2000. Also in the year 2000 he was
recognized with a lifetime achievement award from the
New Yorker,
and he became a father for the fourth time, at age eighty-four, when
his fifth wife gave birth to a daughter.

For More Information

Atlas, James.
Bellow: A Biography.
New York: Random House, 2000.

Hyland, Peter.
Saul Bellow.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.

Miller, Ruth.
Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.

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